The entry tells the Atlantic. The Mediterranean came first, and Bombard called it what it was: “our preliminary canter,” a dress rehearsal for crew and equipment in a sea “so deceptively like a lake.” It was also the only part of the experiment that had two subjects, and the only part in which the sealed stores were ever put to a test by hunger. This piece follows it from the quay at Monaco to the yacht club at Tangier, as The Bombard Story tells it, with the medical summary Bombard wrote at the end of it.

The quay

They were to leave from the little harbour of Fontvieille on Saturday 24 May 1952. The transmitter that a journalist had promised in exchange for the broadcasting rights arrived that morning, a bare chassis with a battery receiver and a kite for an aerial, and a radio amateur named Jean Ferré, sent down from Paris by the French Transmitting Network, told the room without equivocation that there was no possibility of maintaining contact with it. Neither Bombard nor Palmer knew Morse. At about two in the afternoon an official came to seal the jerry-cans of emergency water. One jerry-can was left on the quay to make room for the set. The wind was wrong, the crowd was impatient, and the departure was put off a day; a large man in a cowboy hat came out of the crowd to advise Bombard that if his companion died on the way he should not throw him overboard but eat him.

At five on the Sunday morning, 25 May, with the crowd reduced to friends, a launch from an American cruiser anchored in the bay took the dinghy in tow and dropped it a dozen miles out. The two men had refused a ham roll and white coffee at half past four, on the ground that whether they stopped eating then or a few hours later was immaterial. They regretted it for days. At three that afternoon, in a calm, they tried the radio. The kite went into the sea. The emergency aerial, a steel fishing rod, went up the mast, Palmer turned the generator between his knees, the valves lit, Bombard tapped the key a hundred times, and nothing answered. “Now we are completely alone.”

The water

Bombard drank sea water from the first day, “in accordance with the figures for safe absorption that I had worked out.” Palmer, who had agreed with the theory on land, would not. “Once he was faced by reality, the taboo placed for so many generations on sea-water conquered his previous intentions.” On the morning of the twenty-sixth, Bombard examined him: tongue dry and coated, a small rash on the backs of the hands, pulse slow but strong, thirsty, no serious dehydration yet. That afternoon Palmer gave in and began to drink in small amounts, after Bombard had explained that if he waited until he was dehydrated it would be useless and even dangerous to start. By the next morning, Bombard says, the signs had gone, and so had the thirst. The nights brought nearly a pint of condensation into the bottom of the boat, collected with a sponge.

Hunger was the harder thing. They caught a sea perch on 27 May, pressed its juice, ate half raw and dried the rest on the tent, and then caught nothing. On the twenty-ninth two cargo boats passed close and waved; most ships thereafter ignored them, and Bombard concluded that a raft is almost invisible and that the castaway must do the signalling. Whales circled them at night. On the thirtieth they sighted Mount Toro on Minorca, seventy-two hours out, and a storm from the south-east blew them back into the Gulf of Valencia; the meteorological service at Monaco afterwards denied that there had been one. On 1 June, in fog, an albino whale eighty or a hundred feet long swam under them, and an hour later a siren and an engine roared round them for ten minutes and then stopped, and when the fog lifted there was nothing in sight. They never explained it. On the night of 1 to 2 June an abscess rose on Bombard’s jaw; he lanced it with his pocket knife sterilised in the lamp and dusted it with sulfa powder, having refused himself the penicillin because a real castaway would not have it. On 2 June, after five days without food, Palmer saw a ten-pound sea perch idling in the wake and Bombard shot it with the harpoon gun. Food for two days. Then nothing again.

The liner

By 6 June, the thirteenth day, they had decided to stop a ship. Bombard gives the reasoning carefully, because it was the first breach and he knew how it would look. The point of the Mediterranean was to test crew and gear, not survival, which in a sea full of ships was not in question; their families would be asking for a search, and a search would end the experiment; and the sealed stock of condensed foods was for the Atlantic. “It had never occurred to us to broach our own stock of condensed foods … the experiment would thereby have lost all sense.” That evening a ship passed within sight. Palmer fired two rockets and Bombard flashed S.O.S. with the heliograph, and the ship held her course.

At dawn on Saturday 7 June another passed two miles off. Three rockets did nothing. A smoke bomb, thrown into the sea, wrapped them in an orange cloud, and the liner Sidi Ferruch turned. Her captain shouted from the bridge, “Is there something you want?” They asked him to report their position and pass down “a few emergency rations.” He stopped five hundred yards off, and Bombard sculled across on the rudder oar. The first officer handed down food and water; the captain shouted that he had no time for experiments. The sack held sea biscuit, four tins of bully beef and a tin of condensed milk. They drank fresh water. “Little did we realise,” Bombard wrote, “what a cargo of mocking laughter, calumny and even insult that ship carried off, to rebound on our unlucky heads during the coming months.” When Jean Ferré reached them at Ciudadela a fortnight later, the news he brought was that the sponsor had withdrawn and that the newspapers that had never taken the expedition seriously had announced, after the Sidi Ferruch, that it had failed.

Ciudadela

The wind came fair on the eighth and Mount Toro reappeared. For three days they drifted along the cliffs of the north coast, close enough to see a rabbit, Bombard filming the coast so as to prove they had been there if they were blown off again, and diving each day with the harpoon gun for fifteen pounds of fish. A land breeze carried them fifteen miles out on the night of the tenth. On Wednesday 11 June, the eighteenth day, a fishing boat passed them a tow into Ciudadela, and on the mole a Spanish naval officer, Manuel Despujol, asked where they were from. “From France.” “With that?” Bombard produced a newspaper cutting, and the officer stepped back, saluted and said, “Eh bien, Messieurs, vive la France!” “Deeply touched, I asked him to note that the seals on our emergency food stocks were unbroken.”

A week later, leaving for Majorca with food aboard because there seemed no point in fasting on a forty-mile passage, they were driven back by a southerly, took a tow from a fishing boat in a rising gale, and were towed too fast beam-on to a breaking wave. L’Hérétique turned turtle. Palmer, a strong swimmer, called for a rope because a line had wrapped his legs. The fishermen circled the wreck while Bombard dived for what floated out of the tent: the sail, the watertight bags with the exposed film, the sleeping bags. The cameras, the radio, the compass and the binoculars were gone, the mast broken, the tent torn. “Jack, we are going on, aren’t we?” “Of course.” The lesson, Bombard wrote, was never to drift without the sea anchor out and the bow to the waves.

What followed was six weeks of shore. Two Frenchmen who had got hold of Palmer’s log-book copied it out on the quay; Bombard went to Paris by car in twenty-two hours to find that nobody would pay for spares, that his sponsor refused “to be an accessory to my ‘suicide,’” and that a gendarme’s order for eight thousand francs in court costs was waiting for him at the hospital in Amiens. Spares came by air to Palma; they sailed to Ibiza, slept on pine needles in a cove, were moved on by two civil guards, took deck passage from Alicante to Ceuta on the Monte Biscargui as the only fare they could afford, and were lowered over her side off Tangier at night with the dinghy already inflated.

The summary

At Tangier, Bombard wrote up the fourteen days at sea as a case. “First of all the problem of drink. From 25th to 28th May we drank sea-water: for four days in my case, and three in Jack’s.” Urine normal, no thirst; the thing to remember was “not to wait for dehydration before drinking sea-water.” Two days on sea perch; six more days of sea water, “bringing us to the safety limit”; two more days of fish. “In other words, out of fourteen days we drank fish juice for four and sea-water for ten. By interrupting the consumption of sea-water we were able to double what I considered the safety limit.”

Hunger: cramp-like pains to the shoulders on the first day and part of the second, then somnolence and a permanent fatigue; the remedy was “a vegetative existence,” a kind of hibernation. “Our blood pressure hardly varied, but in this respect I do not think the experiment lasted long enough for concrete results.” No vomiting, no diarrhoea; constipation for twelve days, with constant wind; dry skin from the third day but no petechiae, no oedema of the ankles, two days of a swollen face, cuts slow to heal and quick to go septic, the abscess on the fifth day, a slight drying of the lips at the start. That is the whole of the physiology, for two men over fourteen days of which ten were on sea water and four on the Sidi Ferruch’s biscuit, and it is the nearest the experiment ever came to a comparison, because the only difference between the two subjects on the first day was that one of them drank and the other would not.

Palmer, “the perfect crew,” brought the boat to Tangier and then, on the shore, found a reason every day not to leave it. He told a friend that if Bombard kept them there much longer he would never be able to go; the American naval attaché waved pilot charts at them and said they would never reach Casablanca; the sponsor flew in to say that an inflatable would not hold together ten days at sea. On the morning of Wednesday 13 August Palmer went into Tangier for last purchases and did not come back by six, and Bombard, with the last favourable wind of the week running out, left him a note and went alone. The Atlantic has no second subject.

Sources

• Alain Bombard, The Bombard Story, translated by Brian Connell, London: André Deutsch, 1953, parts I and II (“The Plan Takes Shape,” “Mediterranean”) and the opening of part III (“Atlantic”): everything above, including the sealing of the jerry-cans, the radio, Palmer’s first day, the Sidi Ferruch, Ciudadela, the capsize, the summary written at Tangier, and the note of 13 August. In copyright; quoted in short phrases. archive.org
• Guy Angus, “Dr. Bombard’s Impossible Adventure,” Taranaki Daily News, 3 October 1953, page 12, for the sponsor’s name, Jan Schat, “a Dutch manufacturer of lifesaving equipment,” which the book withholds. Papers Past